"Simplification of the user interface. We show only the accepted answer (or highest voted answer if no answer has been accepted yet). We removed the sidebar, comments and vote counts in order to minimize distraction. This gets you to your answer and on to your project quickly."
There are a few more points listed there such as translation and displaying snippets of related questions that seem to show a genuine effort to help answer questions.
I think eFreedom nicely illustrates the problem Matt Cutts and the folks at Google face. The site appears to be playing by Stackoverflow's and Google's rules, possibly doing SEO better than Stackoverflow. If Google also ranks based on page load times, eFreedom might be helped even more, since the site lacks the majority of Stackoverflows features and might load faster. So a programmer, having never heard of or cares about Stackoverflow, interested in only finding a specific answer that includes their Google query, might see nothing wrong with the eFreedom response. Suppose the majority doing Google searches preferred eFreedom based on measured clicks. Should the fact that Stackoverflow was the originator of the content guarantee them a higher page rank? What if Stackoverflow was slow? And stepping back from these two specific sites, how do you deal with that across all sites and their clones?
I avoid eFreedom links because I enjoy participating in Stackoverflow and use the other features, and despite the assurances of the folks at eFreedom the site still seems shady. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that Google would take steps to ensure Stackoverflow ranks higher. But that's just one case out of many. It seems like a tough problem for Google to solve across the Internet.
Thanks for the link, but sorry, I don't get it. The accepted answer on SO is right at the top, and if I thought eFreedom had a better interface we wouldn't be clicking through to SO each time.
To each his own, I suppose, but I'm not impressed by what appears to be their "value" - SEO - and agree the site seems a bit shady.
"Simplification of the user interface. We show only the accepted answer (or highest voted answer if no answer has been accepted yet). We removed the sidebar, comments and vote counts in order to minimize distraction. This gets you to your answer and on to your project quickly."
There are a few more points listed there such as translation and displaying snippets of related questions that seem to show a genuine effort to help answer questions.
I think eFreedom nicely illustrates the problem Matt Cutts and the folks at Google face. The site appears to be playing by Stackoverflow's and Google's rules, possibly doing SEO better than Stackoverflow. If Google also ranks based on page load times, eFreedom might be helped even more, since the site lacks the majority of Stackoverflows features and might load faster. So a programmer, having never heard of or cares about Stackoverflow, interested in only finding a specific answer that includes their Google query, might see nothing wrong with the eFreedom response. Suppose the majority doing Google searches preferred eFreedom based on measured clicks. Should the fact that Stackoverflow was the originator of the content guarantee them a higher page rank? What if Stackoverflow was slow? And stepping back from these two specific sites, how do you deal with that across all sites and their clones?
I avoid eFreedom links because I enjoy participating in Stackoverflow and use the other features, and despite the assurances of the folks at eFreedom the site still seems shady. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that Google would take steps to ensure Stackoverflow ranks higher. But that's just one case out of many. It seems like a tough problem for Google to solve across the Internet.